Saturday 18 July 2009 19.01 EDT
First published on Saturday 18 July 2009 19.01 EDT

The UK's professions are world-leaders. Our doctors, lawyers, teachers and armed services, among others, make an enormous contribution to our society. They are also central to Britain's economic future.

After the second world war, a huge growth in professional employment was the engine that got Britain moving socially. By opening their doors to people from a rich variety of backgrounds, the professions created unheard-of opportunities for millions of men and women.

In the decades since then, social mobility has slowed. But that long-running decline may have bottomed out. And with up to 7 million more people needed in the professions by 2020, a second great wave of social mobility is possible in the near future. But it won't just happen. It has to be made. I grew up on a council estate and was lucky enough to end up in the cabinet. I am part of the most socially mobile generation our country has ever seen.

The postwar Labour government's towering achievements - full employment, universal education and a new welfare state - helped millions of people, me included, to realise the new opportunities brought by social and economic change. Likewise, today we need to look beyond the confines of the global economic recession and prepare our country for the opportunities that lie ahead. This and future governments should make the creation of a fair, open and mobile society their number one social priority.

This week I will publish the report of the panel I have been chairing on how professional careers can be open to people of talent regardless of background. In recent years, the professions have made great efforts to expand the pool from which they recruit and government has made much progress in tackling poverty.

The glass ceiling has been raised as a result. But it has not been broken. The gender pay gap has narrowed, but the top professional jobs still go to men, not women. And the professions seem to have become more socially exclusive, not less. Three in four judges and one in two senior civil servants are still privately educated. The evidence my panel has been given indicates that today's doctors and lawyers grew up in families with incomes two-thirds higher than the average family.

There is a chasm between where we are and where we need to be if Britain is to realise the social benefits of a huge potential growth in professional employment. This is more than an issue for those at the very bottom of society. It is an issue for the majority, not the minority.

It matters to what President Clinton famously called the "forgotten middle class". If that growth in social exclusivity is not checked, it will be more and more middle-class kids, not just working-class ones, who miss out.

You can see that in the way getting an internship - nowadays an essential rung on the professional career ladder - depends on who you know, not what you know. Or in the way access to extra-curricular activities, vital to developing the soft skills that employers value, depends on the sort of school children attend. Private schools prioritise such activity. By and large, state schools do not. That disadvantages the state-educated child in the labour market and needs to change.

Too many able children from average middle-income families lose out in the race for professional jobs. It has long been recognised that the UK is an unequal society in which class background too often determines life chances. So it is welcome that, in the past decade, the government has focused on tackling disadvantage.

But we need a new recognition: that a closed-shop mentality means too many people from middle-income as well as low-income families find doors shut to their talents. And we need a new focus: unleashing aspiration, not just beating poverty.

The panel's report will make more than 80 recommendations on how the professions, the government and others can unleash the pent-up aspiration that exists in young people. There is no single lever or organisation that can prise open the professions. It is as much about family networks as it is careers advice, individual aspirations as school standards, university admission procedures as well as career development opportunities.

We know not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer - and not everyone will want to be - but those with ability and aptitude need a fair crack of the whip to realise their aspirations. We will suggest how that could happen. And in more disadvantaged communities we need to go further by entering new territory for public policy and finding new ways of raising the aspirations of those youngsters and families who simply do not believe they will ever progress.

It is not that many young people do not have aspirations. It is that they are blocked. It is not that they do not have talent. To coin a phrase, Britain's got talent - lots of it. It is not ability that is unevenly distributed in our society. It is opportunity. In this sense, the professions simply reflect a wider problem: a governing assumption in too many of our institutions that progress can be achieved on the basis of a limited pool of talent having access to a limited set of opportunities. Such elitism is unjust socially. And it can no longer work economically.

Our success in a globally competitive economy relies on using all of our country's talent, not just some of it. The old notion of a single track, single chance in life has to give way to a new one where opportunities are more widely available to people regardless of their backgrounds.

That means banishing any vestiges of a closed-shop mentality - either in the professions or in our society - once and for all.